xzar_monty

I raise you Finland with Russia AND Sweden as its border pals.

Russia will permanently shut down a consulate in Finland and two Finnish consulates in Russia. The delightfully infantile thing about all this is how the Russian foreign ministry words itself: "Finland bears all responsibility for the current situation." So there is no Russian aggression in Ukraine, Russia is not turning its back to large parts of the diplomatic community, Russia has not done anything wrong, but its pesky little neighbour is being a nuisance and continues to do completely unacceptable things that deliberately provoke and annoy the Russian people. Let's face it, friends and neighbours, Finland is geographically effed in a serious way: on this planet, it is almost impossible to have a worse country right behind your longest border.

Are you familiar with the Frank Zappa song Jesus Thinks You're a Jerk? It starts off as a song about TV evangelists and stuff, but later on, when it starts discussing Republicans etc., it seems like an astonishingly accurate prediction of what's going to happen in the US. I think it's extremely sad that Zappa appeared to be completely right about so much of this.

Iron Maiden have now, for the first time ever, played Alexander the Great in concert. Some of the transitions aren't all that smooth, and Bruce misses some lines, but I must say I'm well chuffed. They did it!

Probably still unconfirmed but looks extremely interesting. I suppose a lot of people remember the recent attempted uprisings in Belarus, and the way they were crushed. I would like to have more hope for the people of Belarus than I currently do, and I would love to be proven wrong in my lack of it.

Is there any discussion of or does anyone have any insight on the quality of the Spanish translation in Pentiment?

Here's an interesting article on Russia's supposed dearth of material. However, I somewhat dislike the choice of words here and would have greatly preferred a more reasoned tone. The juxtaposition of headlines such as "Russia still has more of everything than Ukraine does" and this one in the link below, "Russia fields increasingly desperate...", does not make for pleasant reading. If the first casualty of war is truth, objectivity is surely one of its concomitants. https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3xww/russia-fields-increasingly-desperate-war-machines-cobbled-from-spare-parts

Today, on his Telegram channel, he's talking about the possibility of a civil war in Russia, pointing out that "We are in such a situation that we may lose Russia". He is also disappointed that the children of the Russian elite have been protected and not been sent to the war like ordinary Russians. So I would take whatever he says in a fairly high-sodium way.

I suppose the start of the war qualifies as a cataclysmic moment in a person's life, and if someone were to ask you or me about what we would do in the case of a cataclysmic event, the only honest answer would be: "I don't know." For example, if your house is on fire and you will have to make a split-second decision about whether to prioritize saving someone else or yourself, only then will you know what you're going to do. (Some preparation is possible, but not a whole lot.) But yes, I agree that it is very odd. However, I believe it has something to do with stuff like this. There can be beliefs in us that are stronger than we can understand, and sometimes we're not even aware of them.

Some months ago, there was a really good article in my daily newspaper by a Russian journalist who had gone through his circle of friends and acquaintances and explored their ways of thinking and justifying the war (or not). The most fascinating, frightening and sad group was what he called the "Z people" who were not open to any kind of discussion and who were able to either ignore or rationalize away any counter-argument presented to them. So while some people were able to openly ponder a question such as "But why did we need to invade?", the Z people either brushed it aside or had an answer that was clearly illogical or absurd but still convinced them completely. Of course, this is a fairly common phenomenon: when you discuss climate change, for example, there are some people who are completely convinced of their position and equally unable to even rationally consider other views. So it's a question of psychology rather than education, intelligence or interest. It's also fascinating that people's thinking can be compartmentalized so that while they may be very intelligent in general, they can also be completely "stuck" in some areas of their thinking. A good example would be someone like Frank Zappa whose unrepentant attitude towards smoking could not be swayed no matter what; in fact, he once said bluntly: "I am not buying the data", when the hazards were pointed out to him. The sad thing about this kind of thinking in Zappa's case, for example, was that his scepticism towards governance and officialdom was in itself perfectly justified: the US government really does have a terrible record when it comes to lying to its citizens, and Zappa himself had some pretty awful early experiences with how arbitrarily and unjustly the US can treat its people. But obviously it does not follow from this that the government is always lying. When it comes to lying, misdirection, false information and so on, Russians are in a much worse place than quite a lot of other people in other areas of the world -- and this makes the current situation so much more sinister.

Yeah, I have plenty of those tapes, too! The main difference was in the effort it took: you had to have some money for the cassettes to record the music on, and then you had to do the actual recording. There's no question that all of this activity decreased the sales of some things, but there's also no question that it improved the sales of other things, as in when you became so enthusiastic about something that you had to save some more money to get the whole album, or something (this happened to me a lot). I suppose the universal annoyance of this era was DJs talking over the fadeout -- you wanted to get the final chorus on tape but that stupid guy just had to come on and try to say something ostensibly clever on top of it. Man, that hurt.

All those fires in Russia within the past year and a bit: how many of them are suspicious? And all those Russian deaths in the same period of time: how many of them are suspicious? Is this bit of news suspicious: https://russianfreepress.com/2023/05/21/deputy-minister-of-science-and-husband-of-singer-diana-gurtskaya-pyotr-kucherenko-died-on-the-plane-he-was-46-years-old/ Damned if I know.

This is true, of course, but it completely misses what's significant about this most recent technological change. The music industry has basically had a short history of vinyl, cassette, and CD. To an extent, these "steps" represented new techologies taking over, although they all also co-existed and none of them obliterated any of the others. What the internet and digital sharing of music did was that it created a culture where almost any member of the potential audience could get almost all music he wanted for free. Nothing like this ever happened with the changes from tablet carving to writing to the printing press, simply because it was not technologically possible. Nor has anything like this happened with any changes in transportation, simply for natural physical reasons: there's still a human being who needs to be transported from place A to place B, and no technical shortcut to this is available. But with the music business, it's completely different: if you want, you can forget about spending any money at all on vinyl, cassettes, CDs or whatever, because everything is available for free. And an awful lot of people are doing just this -- and although you mentioned pirates in this thread, the change has been so total that the question of piracy has all but disappeared in this context. This means that there is very little money coming into the industry, and obviously there is no industry that could ever survive this. This is why this most recent technological change is different from the earlier ones. It has essentially destroyed the most important thing an industry needs: money coming in from somewhere. As I said, the established names can still keep going, largely because of loyal fanbases and mostly through money earned from touring, T-shirt sales and such (as opposed to album sales, which don't exist), but no new names are going to establish themselves anymore; it's just not possible, financially speaking, there's too little money coming in -- even if you have millions and millions of listeners on Spotify. Spotify, by the way, is also an example of something else that has happened with this most recent technological change, and it's a development that at least some economists regard as rather sinister. Digital technology tends to create extreme polarization, which means that your company is likely to become the undisputed market leader in whatever it does or it's not going to exist at all. If, for example, you're going to compete with Google, what will happen is that you're either going to get ignored, or if you're any good, you're going to be bought by Google. Ditto Amazon. Ditto several other undisputed market leaders. So, extreme polarization: this most recent technological change in the music industry has been, economically speaking, a marvelously good thing for that Swedish guy who owns Spotify. But not for anyone else.

Sure. But there is no way you can fail to recognize how the situation has changed with the internet. Essentially everything has become available free of charge, and the number of people who are prepared to take advantage of that is huge. It's not a change in people, it's a change in the possibilities: people would have downloaded everything for free from the net in the 1800s, if that had been possible. But this phenomenon has destroyed the music industry and made it so that it's essentially impossible to establish a real career in music these days. I think it's a tremendous loss. The sales of CDs, for instance, have plummeted from 995 million per year (1998) to 32 million per year (2020). Now, if the increase in digital downloads and all that had managed to fix that loss with the revenue coming from the digital side of things, everything would be fine, but of course it has not. So the record business has basically become a hobby.

Senior Russian officials forbidden to resign? Wouldn't be surprised if this was completely true: https://edition.cnn.com/europe/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-news-05-17-23/h_2738f81391832671709d39eeb3a351a6

I have now done two different mythic playthroughs, Azata and Trickster, and I must say Azata was about a hundred times better. The Trickster storyline seems so forced, and most notably, it's just not funny. I quite liked some of the Trickster mythic abilities, but as far as the written content... nah. Just poor.

Yeah, the era of the album is pretty much gone. They're too expensive to make and there is no audience for them anymore. The difference between how successful a band is live and how much their albums sell these days can be huge. I mean, Iron Maiden tours stadiums worldwide. But their most recent album sold nothing. Even the best-selling albums sell nothing these days: Taylor Swift under 2 million in 2022, Adele 1.5 million in 2021. The big change happened during the first decade of the 2000s, and I suppose there's no going back. I remember the time when record companies and the business in general was a huge thing (I also worked as a journalist at the time), but once the internet and free sharing really got going, the companies started to dwindle, and these days there's hardly anyone working at them anymore. I don't feel sorry for the record companies, but I think it's awful that the people making good music are not able to make a living out of it. The whole polarization phenomenon (i.e. the fact that nearly everyone gets nothing and someone gets nearly everything) can be aptly summarized by the fact that the Swedish guy who owns Spotify and whose artistic contribution remains at absolute zero is richer than Paul McCartney.

It wasn't the death of CDs that destroyed the industry, nor did I say so. It was the proliferation of free internet sharing which gave birth to a generation who regards it as their right to have all of their music for free[*]. As a consequence of this, musicians are no longer able to make a living through their music, sales have plummeted to abysmal levels and the industry is essentially dead. Some old names still keep it going, but only for a little while longer. It makes me sad, being such a lover of music. There are no new major bands, and there won't be. I suppose the most recent band that can still tour stadiums is Metallica, and they were formed in the very early 1980s. The whole of the 2000s have produced nothing of that stature, significance and success. Now, quality is not measured by success, but the current industry is such that you can keep going if you have already established yourself in the earlier era, but it is well-nigh impossible to establish yourself now. [*] A similar phenomenon exists within print media which is in dire straits, and the online media tends to be much, much worse than print media used to be. (But there are exceptions.)

No, I am referring to what you wrote in the book thread, which was this: "Peter Pan and the Starcatchers (2004). I recently read and enjoyed the original Peter Pan (or Peter and Wendy, its proper title), so I thought I would try the next one in the series. I did not know or notice that this was not the same author or made even remotely in the same time period as the original. It's effectively a competent but quite lame direct-to-DVD prequel in classic early 2000s Disney fashion, except it's a book instead of a movie. It's also literally authored by Disney - apparently, they let a bunch of people write what was essentially a pilot chapter, picked what they liked best and rejected the rest, then let their choice of author write five milquetoast Peter Pan books. I do not recommend." This is currently the second-to-last comment in the thread, you can go and check. I don't take issue with anything, I was simply astonished that someone would know so little about the history of Peter Pan and would actually, at first, take Peter Pan and the Starcatchers as a book that has something to do with the original.

The bank accounts of Finland's embassies in Russia have been frozen. This is purely out of spite, I suppose. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2023/may/17/russia-ukraine-war-live-last-ship-to-leave-ukraine-under-current-grain-deal-jets-pledge-a-good-start-says-zelenskiy?CMP=share_btn_tw&page=with%3Ablock-64648a908f08053fbe092e9f#block-64648a908f08053fbe092e9f)

Oh but they do! I'm listening to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde on CD as I type, and every once in a while I even receive one as a gift. But yeah, it's rare. I think it's extremely sad that the whole music industry is essentially destroyed. Music is no longer a way to make a decent living unless you happen to be that one guy in Sweden who happens to make an indecent living via Spotify. It's a huge, huge loss for artistic endeavour.

No. It's not Africa's fault, though.

Currently reading El hombre que amaba a los perros (that would be The Man Who Loved Dogs in English), by the Cuban author Leonardo Padura. Looks excellent so far, and I highly recommend it to anyone who can find it in a suitable language. Also pertinent to these times, as the book deals with Trotsky's exile, his murderer, the Spanish Civil War, the Communist Cuba, and so on.

Why's that? The valiant perseverance only carrying you on for so long, I mean. What do you like, then? It is true that other people's comments and/or preferences and whatnot can seem extraordinarily strange because we can come from such different backgrounds. I mean, I remember reading your comment on Peter Pan in the "what are you reading" thread and thinking it was unreal: this person possesses some quite remarkable ignorance when it comes to literature. But yeah, I also possess ignorance on a lot of things.

Not a good time to be a scientist in Russia. This piece of news made me think of Stalin and his era. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/05/16/3-russian-hypersonic-missile-scientists-jailed-for-treasoncolleagues-say-a81155